What Is Halftone And Dithering?

Halftone is a printing technique that recreates smooth gradients using a pattern of dots. Because traditional presses can only lay down solid ink or no ink, they fake the appearance of grey or lighter tones by varying the size and spacing of tiny dots. Larger, denser dots read as darker areas; smaller, sparser dots read as lighter areas. From a normal viewing distance your eye blends the pattern back into a continuous tone.

This is why newspapers, comics, and screen-printed posters have that characteristic dotted texture. The same idea powers the halftone effect in this tool: instead of preserving every pixel, the image is sampled on a grid and each cell is drawn as a mark whose size reflects the brightness of that region.

Dithering solves a related problem: how to represent many shades or colors when only a few are available. Instead of using a single flat color for an area, dithering scatters pixels from a small palette so that, viewed together, they approximate the original tone. This is how early computers displayed photographic images on screens limited to 16 or 256 colors, and why retro game art has that recognisable grainy texture.

Error-diffusion dithering — including Floyd–Steinberg, Jarvis–Judice–Ninke, Stucki, and Burkes — works by pushing the rounding error from each pixel into its neighbours, which produces organic, photographic-looking results. Ordered dithering instead uses a fixed matrix, giving a regular, screen-like pattern that is more predictable and often better for graphic or animated work.

In practice, halftone and dithering overlap. Both reduce a rich image down to a structured pattern, and both rely on your eye to blend that pattern back into tone. This tool lets you combine a halftone dot grid with different dithering algorithms and mark shapes, so you can move smoothly between a clean comic-print look and a grittier, photographic dither.

The best way to understand the difference is to experiment. Load an image, switch between error-diffusion and ordered modes, and adjust the grid size while watching the split preview. You will quickly develop an intuition for which combination gives the texture you want.